The new Google Maps mashups are coming now by the day . . . Here's PremierGuide's (local search platform provider) customer list plotted on a Google Map. Here's a site — ApartmentRatings.com — that has integrated Google Maps and apartment ratings/reviews from locals.
Unresolved issue: Will Google eventually charge publishers that are in one way …

First there was Live 8 and now the Space Shuttle: "Nearly 433,000 people simultaneously watched NASA's webcast of this week's space shuttle launch."
The significant difference between watching this type of event on conventional TV and online is that online you can be targeted by advertisers on the basis of the content and your geography. But …

Britain’s Office of Fair Trading issued a statement on April 5 that it would request that the nation’s Competition Commission begin an investigation into the UK classified directories market. The OFT made the recommendation based on its conclusion that the competition that has emerged recently in the UK directories market has not produced results that …

The Kelsey Group's overly simplistic model of the electronic world looks like this. Content can be information, advertising, video, etc.; the delivery of that content might be cable, DSL or wireless; and the device which is used for access could be a computer, a PDA or a cellphone, among others. It has been our view …

The classifieds aggregator Oodle announced the integration of Google Maps into its housing category listings. Here are two bedroom Santa Cruz, CA vacation rentals, for example.
One of the nice things you can do is drag the map and see the available listings in an adjacent geographic area. So you could literally follow the coast …

Seattle-based Marchex, which is the parent of TrafficLeader, the SEM/SEO firm behind several YP (and newspaper) simplified search marketing programs, has announced the roughly $30 million acquisition of IndustryBrains, which operates a vertical/contextual ad network.
At the end of April, Marchex acquired most of the assets of Pike Street Industries. The deal was reported to …

The folks at PEW have come out with another report that has some generally intuitive but important information for those who are eager to see online trends slow or reverse (read: some in traditional media). Not going to happen. The telephone survey polled approximately 1,000 U.S. teens (12-17) last November.
For the next generation (Y, …

I've believed for a while that My Yahoo! was a powerful model for personalization. To varying degrees the other major portals/search engines are now pursuing a similar strategy. Google recently added more feeds to its personalized home page. Here's MSN's Start.com
Now, as part of its ongoing public (meaning publicly accessible) makeover, AOL has redesigned …

Yahoo! is moving agressively beyond the browser and the desktop as part of an apparent strategy to be the most useful information and lifestyle management service around:
"Yahoo! seeks to provide online products and services essential to users’ lives, and offers a full range of tools and marketing solutions for businesses to connect with Internet users …

In my ongoing fantasy of buying a new Mac, I periodically visit the Apple site. Today I was checking out the widgets page and saw that the Google Maps Widget was the top download. That says two things to me:

Google Maps continues to gain attention and is growing in popularity (I keep getting messages from …

In the first half of 2005, eBayers sold approximately US$10.6 billion worth of goods through the online auction service.
Check out the eBay press release here.
Some things to consider:
- The average sales per eBayer (all 1.5 million) in the first half of 2005 was US$7,067.
- Over half of eBay members use the online auction …

The Swedish publisher Eniro AB has pledged to reduce the decline of its Swedish print business at a faster pace than earlier promised. The publisher saw its print directory revenues in its flagship Swedish market decline by almost 11 percent last year. It originally pledged to cut that figure to minus 5.5 percent and 0 …

The would-be meta-social networking tool, GoingOn, was covered last week by a few folks (mostly the Mercury News and blogs). Advocates said nobody wants to fill out more profiles; skeptics questioned whether the existing social networks would want to play.
Michael Bazeley at SiliconBeat now reports that Yahoo! is opening up 360 to third-party content, …

As widely reported, Yahoo! bought desktop software maker Konfabulator (what a great company name!). Local search and local apps (weather, maps, etc.), among other things, can be taken beyond the browser onto the desktop.
Nothing new there conceptually. But unlike some of the cludgey desktop-based search tools that have come before, this is a much …

MSN's Answer to Google and Yahoo!'s dynamic Web-based mapping tools, Virtual Earth, went live this morning. Needless to say it works better with IE than Firefox (the browser I typically use). It doesn't have the "wow factor" of Google Earth, which is a client-side application — that's really an apples-to-oranges comparison. However, it does have …

I don't buy either of these two arguments. Marketing works and dollars spent are additive. In 1979, AT&T decided that long-distance advertising should no longer be handled by each of the 21 individual operating companies. In a wildly unpopular move (ad managers throughout the Bell System saw their three-martini lunches and football tickets disappear), AT&T …

According to a widely reported new survey by PEW, Americans don't know the technology terms "RSS," "Podcasting" and others. So what's the take-away? Use the technology; don't use the terms.
Awhile ago, before the launch of Backfence, I spoke to co-founders Mark Potts and Susan DeFife. They said, "We are going to use blogging and wiki …

Very briefly: Here are the NY Times' earnings release and Dow Jones/WSJ's. Online products (including the About and MarketWatch acquisitions) gave a boost to these newspaper titans, while the traditional pubs struggled. This is consistent with the bump that Scripps got from its Shopzilla acquisition.
More revenues information from MediaPost.

Let's put aside Yahoo!'s FUSE (Find, Use, Share, and Expand) strategy for the moment and look at what the company is doing with vertical and horizontal search (horizontal search being, well, search).
Yahoo! recently launched a specialized Travel site to go along with its other vertical sites and content plays. Also, the HotJobs meta-search/vertical search …

An article that has received a good deal of attention, from yesterday's NY Times, is "How Effective Is This Ad, in Real Numbers? Beats Me." The piece cites marketers' inability to determine which of their ads/campaigns are actually effective and delivering the best ROI.
Yesterday I participated in a meeting hosted by SEM firm …